Why Twitter Is Failing the World Cup

You can't blame fans for their constant excitement, but the Internet diarrhea that has become the #worldcup hashtag is officially a waste of everyone's time. A by-the-numbers breakdown of one gameday in the life.

Maybe it'll help you celebrate a goal while alone on your couch (or, more likely, your desk). Maybe it gives you a venue for cursing at a referee. But as we found in a (semi-scientific) analysis of 2,000 bursts of 140 characters or less during the U.S.-Slovenia game on Friday a thousand from the #worldcup tag and a thousand from the #USA tag Twitter offers almost nothing of importance, beyond score updates you can already see on TV and blind patriotism (laced with casual racism) that you can hear in a bar. Our findings from one match, admittedly involving lots of that cursing at the ref:

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The #worldcup tag, then, is the foremost miserable experience of this summer's Twitstream and its crowded crowd-sourcing may suggest that Twitter is even more confusing than previously believed. While 16 percent of Friday afternoon's tweets were legitimate news updates ("That's Michael Bradley's first career FIFA World Cup goal"), from what we could tell only 7.6 percent actually furthered the conversation say, a bracket breakdown:

But more than 75 percent of #worldcup tweets are considerably if not horrifyingly less interesting, if not downright useless. Six percent were spam ("Find a local soccer hottie to spend time with"), 24 percent were self-promotion for pundits and companies ("Come check out our #WorldCup menu"), 29 percent were uselessobservations ("most boring 90 minutes ever," "bitch made ref"); and about 17 percent were re-tweet after re-tweet (as opposed to original thoughts) of feeds such as @USSoccer, Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl, and pollster Nate Silver. And we like those guys. But then for every somewhat-useful message, you get about three of these:

Come Wednesday, you're not going to have a much better time keeping track of the U.S.-Algeria showdown: the last match, filtered by a #USA tag, garnered just 10.6 percent meaningful conversation and 6 percent self-promotion, plus 8.4 percent spam, 30 percent babble, 42 percent re-tweets... and only 2.4 percent legitimate news.

So, when it comes to game time, might we suggest actually watching some soccer? Just make sure to turn down the volume those vuvuzelas are not safe.